Platforms and Architectures

Compatible operating systems#

The latest Go release at the time of writing was Go 1.11 (released Aug 2018), and work on Go 2.0 is underway.

Flexibility provided by Go#

The portability of Go-code between OS’s is excellent. Assuming you only use pure Go-code, no cgo, inotify, or any low-level packages, then you can copy the source code to the other OS and compile, but you can also cross-compile Go sources, which you will learn in the next lesson. To present a simpler, more unified and OS-independent interface to the developer from Go1 onwards, the compiler, linker, make-scripts, and so on were all brought together in one tool-chain: the go command, which is written in Go and works in an OS-independent manner.

Go compilers#

Originally the Go compiler and toolchain was written in C. But a gigantic effort was made to rewrite it in Go, which resulted in a bootstrapped (or self-hosted) Go starting from version 1.4. No longer did the Go team have to maintain a different compiler required for every combination of processor-architecture (32 bit and 64 bit) and OS. Work on the compiler is now done in Go, which means things can be done which where not possible in C. Also different developers can participate in perfecting it, since no C knowledge is needed anymore.

The compilers produce state of the art native code and are not linkable with gcc. Furthermore, they work single-pass, non-compacting, and parallel.

The sources of the compilers and linkers can be found under:

＄GOROOT/src/cmd

The lexer/parser is generated with GNU bison. An overview of the build process can be seen by examining:

＄GOROOT/src/make.bash

Most of the directories contain a file doc.go, that provides more information.

File extensions and packages#

The extension for Go source code files is, not surprisingly, .go. C files end in .c and assembly files in .s, where source code-files are organized in packages. Compressed files for packages containing executable code have the extension .a (AR archive). Linker (object) files can have the extension .o. An executable program has the extension .exe on Windows by default.

Remember, when creating directories for working with Go or Go-tools, never use spaces in the directory name, you can replace space by ‘_’.

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Compilers for Go differ for different platforms to provide full support and maximum flexibility. In the next lesson, you will learn how to install Go on your local machine, if the OS of your device has a Go compiler designed for it.